


spark plug brain

by keplcrs



Category: Be More Chill - Iconis/Tracz
Genre: Gen, Hurt/Comfort, bowling alley performance art, no relationships but you can read it as pre-stagedorks if you want to!, theres like. i think one (1) line that i pulled from 2r, yes this is all broadway cast and broadway plot
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-08-22
Updated: 2019-08-22
Packaged: 2020-09-24 06:41:23
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,768
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20354074
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/keplcrs/pseuds/keplcrs
Summary: In the year after the Squip, Jeremy recovers.





	spark plug brain

Jeremy wakes up in the hospital, and the Squip is gone.

His glasses are dirty. They're dirty but they're _ there _, next to his bed, and he's never been quite so grateful for his terrible vision as he is when he has to slip them on to bring everything into focus. 

Rich is in a bed and a full-body cast five feet away from him, talking about shiny happy hive-minds, and then Michael is by his bedside making explosion noises, and his dad is wearing pants, and his head feels so, _ so _ empty. 

It hurts, too– his head. It aches like his brain is tearing itself apart, searching for a staticky-smooth voice and a flash of silver. His own thoughts are all that are left, loud and strangely unfamiliar in the otherwise empty space. 

He tries to tune in to the conversation around him, listens to their advice about Christine and tries not to wince at the rush of guilt that comes with thinking about what he’d done for her, _ to _ her, and to his dad, and Michael, and Brooke and Jake and Rich and Jenna and Chloe. 

Later, when his dad leaves the room to deal with a phone call from the office and whatever paperwork still needs to be done, Jeremy risks a glance at Michael. He’s sitting on the bed next to him, which Jeremy is pretty sure isn’t actually allowed, and he’s playing Tetris on his phone, and he looks exhausted. 

Jeremy takes a minute and looks at him, tan skin and red fabric and glasses reflecting the rotating, brightly-colored boxes scrolling across his screen. He thinks back to the last few times he saw Michael– eyes red-rimmed and clutching the bottled-up fate of the school in his hands; out of place and out of focus in Jake’s upstairs bathroom; pulled-up hood and headphones disappearing from view in the blink of an eye. 

He thinks that he’ll never take the sight of his best friend for granted ever again.

“Jeremy, I can feel you thinking too much, just relax. It’s going to be fine.” Michael’s voice cuts through his thoughts, jolting Jeremy out of his head long enough to see a smile flash across his face, almost genuine enough to convince Jeremy that everything is already going back to normal. 

“Sorry,” Jeremy starts. He takes a quick breath and is almost (not at all) ready to launch into a long-winded, nonsensical, _ proper _apology, trying to pull together a coherent sentence that actually means what he wants it to mean. “I-”

“Don't,” Michael says. Jeremy’s train of thought comes to a screeching halt and for a moment, he feels a rush of panic. 

It’s ironic. He’d pushed Michael away in his selfishness, and yet in that same selfishness he desperately doesn’t want to lose him. 

Michael casts a deliberate glance at Rich across the room trying to pretend that he _ isn’t _ stealing glances at them, and it’s a relief when he finally says “Later,” and gives Jeremy a tired smile. “We’ll talk when it’s just us,” he promises.

As if on cue, Jeremy’s dad pokes his head into the room, phone still pressed to his ear, and gives the two of them a questioning thumbs up, to which Jeremy nods and Michael responds with a thumbs up of his own, before giving Jeremy a pointed look. 

“Later,” he repeats, clicking his phone screen back on and swiping to unlock it. Jeremy catches sight of his background, a photo of the two of them from the summer before that Jeremy had insisted he looked too pale in, but Michael had apparently kept anyway. 

His own phone sits next to the bed, turned upside-down and nearly dead, the lock screen a photo he’d been made to take with Brooke. It was a nice photo.

Jeremy reaches for his phone and changes the background.

His photos from before are gone, selfies with Michael and pictures of Michael and a few old photos of himself with his mom deleted and replaced, camera roll filled instead with pictures of Brooke across the table at Pinkberry, and Christine in rehearsal, and Rich flipping him off in his room post-Mario Kart, and himself with Jake at that god awful party, and Twitter screenshots of Jenna Rolan in front of Jake’s burning house. 

He picks one of the free preset wallpapers and stares at the screen until his phone dies.

* * *

Jeremy wakes up in Michael’s basement, and there’s a voice in the back of his head that isn’t his own.

For a moment, it’s everywhere. Its face lingers in his peripheral, flashing in and out of existence amidst the shadows cast by the TV’s light, and its voice fills his ears like syrup, if syrup sounded like whispers on a low-quality ASMR video. 

It hurts his head, hurts his eyes, hurts the scars that litter his back— it hurts like hell. 

_ “Jeremy,” _ he hears, sticky-sweet and condescending. 

He squeezes his eyes shut, shakes his head, tells himself that it’s not real. There is a very real pill full of very real hardware that is still in his very real brain, but it doesn’t work anymore. It’s not real.

“Jeremy,” he hears again, gentle and worried and different, warped by a layer of static.

He keeps his eyes shut.

“Jeremy,” he hears, and the static fades, until it’s dull and nearly silent. “Wake up, man.”

He opens his eyes. 

Michael is kneeling in front of him, backlit by the TV. There’s rough fabric scratching at the back of his exposed arms, the ratty couch in Michael’s basement pressed against his back. His legs are bent awkwardly, tucked underneath him and cramping, and there’s a controller being eased out of his hands. 

“M’kay,” Jeremy mumbles.

His back hurts. He sits up, clears his throat and tries again. “I’m okay. Sorry.”

“Don’t be,” Michael assures him. “You fell asleep halfway through Level 11, I was going to suggest heading upstairs.” 

He pauses, like he wants to say more. 

(Jeremy doesn’t really want to talk about it, but he’ll talk if Michael says something. There are a lot of things he’ll only say if Michael brings it up first. Things he’ll only say if Michael wants to hear it, because Jeremy owes him that much. He owes Michael answers, but he doesn’t want to dump everything on him out of the blue, and so he waits until Michael brings it up first. Except, he never does.)

“Do you want more Red?” Is the question that Michael asks. _ ‘Is it back _ ,’ is what he means. ‘ _ Are you okay,’ _ and ‘ _ what’s wrong’ _? 

Yes, he wants Red. Maybe it’s back. No, he’s not okay. So many things.

“No thanks,” Jeremy says. 

He knows that Michael’s supply of Mountain Dew Red won’t last forever, especially not when it’s the only supply accessible to everyone from the play. It takes barely a capful of flat soda to send the Squip fizzing out of existence again, but one capful could easily become two capfuls, three capfuls, the rest of the case. 

Michael scans his face, sad and curious and knowing and a billion other things all at once, and Jeremy tries not to flinch under his gaze, ducking his head. He’s lying, and Michael knows he’s lying. Jeremy’s sure that Michael is going to call him out on the lie, offer him the Red anyway.

“Okay.” Jeremy’s still waiting for the offer, denial on the tip of his tongue, but Michael is already on his feet and halfway to the basement door, looking back at Jeremy with raised eyebrows. “Come on, let’s go. Quiet, though- my moms are asleep.”

It hits him, suddenly, that for all the faux-normalcy that came with sitting in Michael’s basement playing video games, things are not the same.

There’s an underlying current of tension that Jeremy has been trying to will out of existence, and a careful hesitance to Michael’s words, like he’s afraid that if he says the wrong thing, Jeremy will up and leave (_ again _, Jeremy’s brain helpfully supplies, as if he needed the rush of guilt that came with the reminder).

“Jeremy? Are you coming?” 

_ Sever your ties or you both drown. _

He scrambles to his feet with a wince, elbows knocking against the leg of the couch. 

“Yeah. Yep. I’m- yeah.”

Michael gives him a strange look, but he doesn’t ask- he just starts heading up the stairs, leaving Jeremy to trail behind him with a sore elbow and poorly-hidden guilt.

They still haven’t talked. 

There’s a sleeping bag on Michael’s floor for Jeremy, and a pillow tossed down beside it. As much as Jeremy wants to just slide into the sleeping bag and sleep until everything is okay again, he doesn’t. He can’t. 

“Michael,” he starts, and Michael steps around him to sit on the bed, plugging his phone in and shaking his head.

“Later,” he says. “You’re tired.”

Jeremy really isn’t, but it’s clear that Michael doesn’t want to talk about it. 

“Tomorrow?” He asks. 

Michael nods. “Tomorrow,” he promises.

Tomorrow comes and goes, and Jeremy leaves the Mell house with an apology for all the wrong things. 

“Sorry,” he mumbles, feet scuffing against the rug by the half-open door. “My dad wants a, uh. family dinner tonight.”

Michael nods, and doesn’t offer him a ride. “I’ll see you tomorrow,” he says. Tomorrow, again. “First day back, right?”

It’s not Michael’s first day back anywhere, but it marks Jeremy’s long-awaited (read: dreaded) return to school. He kind of wants to skip, to take one more day and recover at home, but he has people to apologize to and homework to collect and notes to catch up on, and he has to go. 

“Yeah.”

There’s a beat of silence, and it’s almost like a scene from a movie- Jeremy standing in front of the door with his backpack and new blue hoodie to replace the cardigan that's gone missing amidst piles of laundry that he and his dad are slowly working through, one of his shoelaces already coming undone, and Michael leaning against the wall a few feet away, watching him leave with an unreadable expression. Except, in a movie, Michael would stop him or Jeremy would stay, and they would talk it out, and things would go back to normal, cue credits, et cetera. Instead, Jeremy’s phone rings and he’s pushing open the door as he answers it, waving goodbye to Michael as he leaves. 

“Hey dad, I’m on my way, don’t worry, I’ll stop on my way home and grab something us some soda, does ginger ale sound okay-”

* * *

It’s a Thursday afternoon, and there’s no rehearsal anymore, but in the half hour since class ended, he’s run into about half of the Midsummer’s cast in the halls, as if there was some sort of phantom rehearsal that had to end before they could leave. It’s a little weird, sure, but it makes it easier for him to locate everyone and apologize sincerely when he’s less worried about catching them before they leave. 

(He’s already narrowly avoided bumping into Jake in the school foyer, and his apology turned into a ten-minute conversation about the play, and Rich, and the hospital, and “Let’s go out for pizza sometime.” He’d also caught up with Brooke, just outside the front doors with her keys in one hand and phone in the other, and that had been less successful but at least she’s talking to him, and he’s been promised a chance to make up for it via hanging out at Pinkberry because Brooke “thinks he’s actually pretty sweet when he’s being himself,” and that’s a start. It’ll be fine, he thinks.) 

“Hey, can we talk?” 

Jenna looks up at him from her seat on the bleachers, and nods. He sits down, pulling his jacket more tightly around himself. It’s the black jacket he’d worn to the play, and he can tell Jenna notices it too— he didn’t want to wear it, but as much as he hates to admit it, it’s warm and sort of waterproof and it doesn’t crinkle or make some sort of noise whenever he moves.

He doesn’t want to explain that, though, and it isn’t what he’s here to talk about.

“I want to, um. Apologize,” he says, at the same time that Jenna says “I didn’t start the ecstasy rumor.” 

“What?” He asks, because yeah, he knows about the ecstasy rumor— of course he knows about it; people in the halls keep asking him if he really did put drugs in the props and someone even promises to join the drama club next year if he can do it again— and he also knows Jenna didn’t start it. Well, he didn’t know for certain, but he knows that Jenna knows about Squips and that, despite that, no one has been talking about them even though it makes a _ much _ more compelling rumor than Mr. Reyes accidentally letting someone fill the ‘pansy serum’ with ecstasy (especially after the “arsenic and old lace” debacle from the previous year). If he was being honest, he’d suspected that it was actually Chloe.

“I didn’t start the ecstasy rumor,” she repeats. “If that’s what you’re here about. I tried not to spread it, either.” 

Jeremy is a little stunned, but he shakes his head. “No, uh— I know.”

“You know?” Now it’s Jenna’s turn to look surprised. Jeremy can’t help but feel guilty— there’s a reason she assumed he was only there to talk about gossip, and despite the fact that yes, it had been under his Squip’s instructions, Jeremy was probably a part of that reason.

(“That’s sad,” he remembers thinking, looking at Jenna through some sort of simulated screen, code rushing past the left edge right next to where she stood. “What should I do?”

_ Ignore her, _ the Squip had said, like it was the most obvious thing in the world.)

Jeremy closes his eyes and tries to block out the reminder, and when he opens them again, Jenna looks concerned. He keeps talking. “I know,” he repeats. “At least— I mean, I didn’t think it was you that was telling people about it. I’m not— that’s not why I’m here.” He falters, and Jenna looks at him expectantly. Behind her, in quickly-emptying the parking lot, he can see his dad’s car pulling into an newly-freed parking space. He doesn’t want to rush this, though. “I’m, um— I want to apologize. I was a jerk, and I’m sorry—”

Jenna cuts him off with a small smile and a shrug. “It’s okay,” she says. “People have been bigger jerks for worse reasons.” And then, when she sees Jeremy’s expression, she adds, “Myself included, so I get it. But thanks, really. None of those people ever apologized.”

He still has more to say. That can’t be good enough— a simple apology, just like that. It doesn’t feel like enough, but Jenna seems genuine and his dad has spotted him and is waving from the car window, much to her amusement. 

“I think your ride is here,” she points out, and Jeremy lets out a sheepish laugh. 

“Yeah. Hey, uh—” He nearly stops there, faltering and trying to get the words out, but Jenna is patient and gives him a second to gather his thoughts and piece together a coherent sentence. “We should… hang out sometime.”

She looks reasonably skeptical, but nods. “Sure,” she agrees slowly. 

“No gossip or- or anything,” Jeremy tries to assure her, and it’s true. He thinks that they might not actually be that dissimilar, and he briefly wonders if he could have ended up more like her if he was just a bit more observant, a bit more outgoing. “I just- you mentioned, when I gave you the—”

Jenna interrupts him with a wince and a wave of her hand. “Yeah, okay, got it. Thank you, though. For the effort.”

It takes them a whole week and a half to actually do anything other than trade notes and make idle conversation in the halls— although that _ is _a new development that Jeremy is pretty proud of— but eventually they do end up settling into a semi-normal routine of hanging out outside of class that mostly consists of Jeremy helping her with yearbook stuff or her and Brooke taking him around to the thrift stores near the school. 

* * *

It's not a date, not really, because Christine still needs to figure out who she is and Jeremy really should be doing the same thing, so they're not officially dating— yet, Christine had told him, with a playful wink and a kiss on the cheek— but Jeremy is still nervous as hell about hanging out with her. 

What it _ is _, is bowling alley performance art, and Jeremy spends the first half hour feeling absolutely mortified, but Christine is laughing and pulling him through the 'scene' with her, and he's almost shocked to find that he's actually having fun. 

To his surprise, they don't get kicked out of the bowling alley for good— the attendee at the front counter looks sort of amused by Christine's antics, and when the performance art piece is over, they play a serious game of bowling. Well, as serious as they can get, when Jeremy hasn't bowled in literal years and has a quiet voice in the back of his mind telling him how to hold the ball or making fun of how weak his throw is, and Christine still coos at the bowling balls before her turn just to make him laugh. 

(In the end, it almost seems like they'll get kicked out for how utterly horrible they both are at bowling instead of any performance art. They don't, but the attendee looks a lot less amused when Christine rolls a bowling ball right in between two remaining pins and shouts "Goal!", and Jeremy cheers.)

By the time they leave the bowling alley, it's starting to get dark and Jeremy's sides are hurting from all the laughing he's been doing. 

"We should get ice cream!" Christine chirps, from beside him, hands tucked into the pockets of her dress. "I know this really good ice cream place— it's local and kind of small, but the guy who owns it knows my dad and their ice cream is _ really _ good, and they might be closing soon but we should still check it out!" 

Jeremy nods, trailing half a step behind her and pulling his hoodie tighter around himself. "Sure, let's- let's do it! Lead the way!" He replies, and surprises himself with how steady his voice is. 

It's technically a little too cold for ice cream, but the shop is still open and there's no one inside, and Jeremy is in no position to complain when Christine tugs him through the door. Christine introduced him to her mom's friend with a little flourish, and they got their ice cream— strawberry for Jeremy, mint chocolate chip for Christine— before finding a table tucked away in the corner next to the window. 

They eat in silence for a while— and it really is silence save for the hum of freezers and the faint music coming from the speakers, bright and generic. There's no nagging voice in the back of his head, no dull static to drown out the music. It's nice. Jeremy relishes in it for a moment before he speaks up. "I, uh." He pauses, running his thumb over the texture of the cone. "Thank you."

Christine gives him a bit of a quizzical look. "For what? If anything, I should be thanking you— I mean, that performance wouldn't have been nearly as good if I'd been on my own, and they didn’t even kick us out!" 

Jeremy laughs, shaking his head. "Not for that. Well- kind of for that, 'cause I don't think I would have been able to do something like that with anyone else," he admits, before trying to draw himself back to his point before he goes too far off-topic, "but for- for today in general. I had a really good time." 

"I had fun too, Jeremy!" Christine giggles softly at the expression that flits across Jeremy's face. "Don't look so surprised, silly, of course I had fun. We should do this again sometime. Maybe no more bowling ball babies, though— we'll come up with something new." 

"I'd like that," he murmurs, smiling, and immediately has to duck his head to stop a drop of ice cream from dripping onto his hand.

* * *

Jeremy wakes up tangled in his comforter, and for a brief, terrifying moment, he thinks it’s back. 

There’s Matrix-esque code and user agreements rushing past his vision, and he’s thrashing, panicked, trying to catalogue everything he’s had to drink in the past three days, frantically trying to figure out whether or not he’s somehow managed to reactivate it because he may be stupid sometimes but this was big, and it was important, and he swears that he’d been careful. 

And then it disappears, just like that, and he’s left sitting up in bed, covers wrapped around his legs and phone lighting up with a slew of late-night messages from Rich. 

(They aren’t close, not yet, but it isn’t the first time he’s woken up to texts detailing Rich’s whirlwind of thoughts– the ones he sends to Jeremy are usually Squip-related, or something weird and geeky if he thinks Jeremy needs a pick-me-up. He thinks that most of the other rambling messages go to Brooke, or Michael- someone who isn’t Jeremy.)

He picks up his phone and unlocks it, staring at the dark violet sky and pinpricks of light that fill his background. It buzzes again, another text message from Rich— something about his dream, and voices.. Jeremy doesn’t open it. Instead, he starts a new message to Michael, fingers hovering above the keyboard. 

_ are you awake?| _

He stops. From the top of the screen, he sees yet another message from Rich. 

He deletes his message to Michael, and taps on Rich’s contact instead. At least he knows Rich is awake. 

They don’t talk about the Squip, because Rich is talking different staging possibilities of a Shakespeare play that Jeremy hasn’t read— no doubt introduced to him by Christine— but it’s a welcome distraction, and by the time Jeremy falls asleep half an hour later, he feels genuinely better. 

He tries to ignore Michael’s questioning gaze when Rich approaches them the next morning, running up right before class and clapping Jeremy on the back with a, “Hey, I figured you fell asleep last night but you’ve got to hear this new idea I had for a production of Julius Caesar, like the first one I told you about— you know, the one with the Ouija board, but this time—”

* * *

It's the day after exams end, and summer has pretty much already started. Brooke had hosted the end-of-year 'get together' this time, with invitations extended to everyone in the play as well as the usual slew of popular kids that Jeremy now knows. He'd gone, said hello, denied a drink, murmured an apology to Brooke for being unable to stay, and immediately bailed— it was too loud, too crowded, too suffocating. 

(She'd given him a sympathetic nod, told him to have a good summer, and reminded him to keep in touch.)

He finds himself a few blocks away instead, outside 7-11 and perched on the curb in front of the door, a slushie in hand and another dripping condensation onto the pavement next to him. His phone buzzes with a new message from Michael.

_ ill be there in 15 _

(received 8:13pm)

He waits, sipping his slushie and staring blankly at his phone, earbuds in and playing music to drown out the static in his head while he cycling through photos and videos from Brooke's party without really looking at them. 

It's 8:26 when Michael's car pulls into the parking lot. Jeremy clicks his phone off and pockets it, picking up the cherry slushie he'd grabbed for Michael and walking over to the passenger door, knuckles tapping lightly against the window to get him to roll it down. 

"Hi," Jeremy says, passing the cup to Michael and opening the door. "Thanks for picking me up. Dad thinks I'm still at the party."

"No problemo," Michael replies, taking a long sip of the slushie. And then, teasing, "You know I'll go to great lengths for a slushie. And you, I guess."

Jeremy almost winces, because he knows it's true. He takes a sip of his slushie instead, and then buckles his seatbelt even though Michael has turned the car off. 

"You wanna go for a drive?" Michael asks, watching him carefully. Jeremy hesitates, and shakes his head. 

"Can we go back to your place and- and hang out in your backyard or something?" 

Michael nods, and turns the key in the ignition. Jeremy gives him a grateful smile, and Michael gives him a small one in return. 

Here's the thing: they're stuck in this sort of limbo. At least, that's what it's felt like to Jeremy for the past few months. Things are tentatively okay. They're far from perfect, and there's a lot that hasn't been said, but things aren't terrible. They've talked a little bit— weighted apologies amidst lighthearted jokes, half-finished explanations that get caught in Jeremy's throat until the subject shifts to something easier, spontaneous texts in the middle of the night vaguely describing whatever weird nightmare Jeremy's just had alongside the context if he can bring himself to provide it. They've eased into this false sense of normalcy, where everything that happened has been pushed under the rug to be tripped over, and the things that they _ really _ need to talk about hang in the air over their heads like an impending storm that they keep ignoring. Michael will still pick him up from 7-11 and play video games with him and send him song recommendations at two o'clock in the morning, but he doesn't ask about Jeremy's mom anymore, and he never shows up at Jeremy's house unannounced to hang out like he used to, and he'll sometimes spend lunch with his headphones and hood pulled up. Similarly, Jeremy still buys him slushies and makes himself at home in Michael'd basement, but there are still things he won't talk about, and sometimes he texts Rich about his worries instead of Michael— but it's fine, they're fine. Better to be teetering on the edge of 'back to normal' than broken beyond repair, right? 

* * *

They're outside, lying in Michael's backyard, Jeremy's plastic cup with the last remaining dregs of his slushie on the grass beside him. They're not talking— Michael's phone lies between them, playing some new album that Jeremy hasn't heard yet, and the sky is clear enough to see the stars. 

It's almost peaceful.

Except, the music kind of sounds like it's been filtered through cheap, half-broken dollar store headphones and Jeremy is cold even though it's basically summer and he's got a sweater on— and he doubts the chill is from the night air. 

"Jeremy?" 

He startles, just a little, head turning to look at Michael, who stares back at him. "Huh?"

There's a beat of silence, like Michael is trying to read him and having some trouble. That expression has gotten a lot more common ever since Jeremy got out of the hospital.

Eventually, he asks, "Are you okay? You're spacing out."

Jeremy hesitates, and then nods. Michael looks skeptical, but he doesn’t say anything else, and Jeremy can’t help but feel relieved— guilty, because he knows they need to talk and he knows he keeps passing up the opportunity to do so, but relieved, because he still doesn’t know what to say. 

And then the relief passes, because Michael is sitting up and picking up his phone and turning the volume down. 

Jeremy is just starting to get up when Michael speaks.

“I’ve been talking to Rich,” he starts, and Jeremy freezes. “He said, uh- I mean. I dunno if it’s different for you or something, but he was talking about some stuff—”

It sounds stilted, and awkward, and not-Michael. Even at the Halloween party, and at the play, he still sounded like _ Michael _, distinctly himself no matter the consequences, and now he sounds like he’s trying to read from a script that he didn’t write. Jeremy thinks that might be his fault. 

“What kind of stuff?” Jeremy asks. He isn’t playing dumb, he knows they’re been talking about the Squip, but the thing is— there’s so much _ stuff _ attached to it, and Jeremy knows he needs to talk about it now while Michael is there and listening and present but he has no idea where to start.

Michael gives him a pointed look, and Jeremy tries not to frown. “You know.”

“That’s vague,” he responds. When Michael doesn’t reply, he rushes to clarify, “I mean, I do know, but it’s still vague. There’s a lot to be said about… about it.” 

Michael stays silent for a second, and then he stands up, one hand clutching his phone and the other held out towards Jeremy. 

“Let’s go inside.”

They talk.

They go inside, Michael with his phone and Jeremy with his empty cup, and they move silently around the kitchen for a few minutes getting snacks and throwing out the trash and putting the clean dishes away, and then Jeremy leads the way down to the basement and they _ talk. _

It’s not as easy as Jeremy had hoped it would somehow be, but it’s also not as difficult as he’d feared. It takes some prompting on Michael’s part, but once he starts talking, it's hard for him to stop and everything soon comes spilling out like a waterfall of apologies and excuses and apologies-for-excuses, but Michael listens and doesn’t get pissed like Jeremy had feared. In return, Jeremy listens and doesn’t immediately get defensive whenever Michael interjects. 

And they talk. 

It feels good to get it out of the way, even if Jeremy feels too light without the idea of that discussion weighing him down. He and Michael don’t feel like they’re teetering on the edge of shattering their newly-rebuilt friendship anymore, and the limbo feeling is gone. 

(That isn’t to say that Jeremy doesn’t still feel weird, or that their friendship is suddenly back to normal. Far from it, actually, but it feels like a step in the right direction. He doesn’t feel so stuck, so _ stagnant _ . They’re working on it now— that’s better than trying to cram an apology for _ everything _ into a passing “Sorry,” when he accidentally knocks his shoulder against Michael’s in the mall food court, or sending him a text about some nightmare or other only to delete it twenty minutes later.)

Jeremy sleeps over, that night. It’s quarter to midnight by the time they finish their heart-to-heart and he’d texted his dad to let him know where he was before they had talked. They stay in the basement, and Michael drags his comforter downstairs while Jeremy gathers extra pillows from the couch and blankets from hallway closet. It’s quiet, but it doesn’t feel tense as they make a nest-slash-fort-slash-pile-of-blankets on the basement floor, just big enough for the two of them, a bowl of popcorn, and Michael’s laptop. 

“Do you wanna watch _ How to Train Your Dragon _?” Michael asks, and when he turns it on, the audio sounds quiet but crystal clear.

* * *

The summer that follows is easily one of the best ones Jeremy has ever had. 

The Squip remains in his head, taunting him with snide comments and ‘advice’ when he least expects it and distracting him with white noise and static when he _ does _ expect it. 

Still, it’s a good summer. 

He knows that his expression twists into a grimace when it actually speaks to him, because Michael points it out and asks if he needs Red, and on one memorable occasion Christine asks where the voice sounds like it’s coming from and flips off the air in that direction, just to make Jeremy laugh. (It works. He bursts into laughter and the Squip goes silent.)

He knows that the static sometimes has him zoning out mid-conversation, because he’ll blink and it’ll be gone, but he’s missed half of a story. Christine has learned to deal with this by telling all of her stories to him in long-winded, theatrical spiels complete with barely-connected improvised monologues if she notices that he’s not quite paying attention, so that he only misses a piece of the story instead of most of it _ and _ no one pays them any mind because she’s still talking and he at least appears to be present. Michael will pause, and wait, and sometimes try to talk over the white noise so that Jeremy has something to focus on. Rich just fills him in on the details of what he missed post-conversation, over text or over homemade smoothies courtesy of Jeremy’s dad, his new Ninja blender, and the folder full of recipes that he had gotten Jeremy to help him print out. Everyone else is— well, they’re making an effort. Jeremy thinks that they’re making an effort, at least.

Even the parts of summer that usually suck— namely, when his dad goes back to work and Jeremy’s left at home all day, and the times when that intersects with the two weeks that Michael always spends on vacation elsewhere with his moms— aren’t as bad as they usually are. He spends time with Brooke, and goes out with Christine, and invites Rich over to play videos games so they can turn the volume up and not worry about Rich’s dad. He even lets Jake drag him to the beach alongside everyone else, and it’s still a win even if he spends most of the day under a beach umbrella texting Michael trying not to get sunburned. 

He still wakes up feeling like his head is too quiet, and sometimes it takes him a full minute and a concerned glance to realize that he’s been waiting for a line or a prompt that won’t come, but it’s okay. His dad still spends most weekends and the occasional weekday pantsless and stuck at the kitchen table for hours, but it’s okay. Rich still texts him about nightmares amidst a flurry of messages about starting a band, and Christine checks in on him more often when he’s quiet even if it’s just calm-quiet and not bad-quiet, and and and— but it’s fine, he’s fine, they’re fine. It’s going to be fine. 

(And, nearly a year after the whole thing started, he actually believes it.)

**Author's Note:**

> i dont actually really know what a spark plug does or what the brain equivalent is but the title is from flesh and bone (the robot song) by joe iconis so go check that out because it is arguably one of the best joe iconis songs out there 
> 
> im on tumblr at asianjeremyheere if you want to talk bmc with me!


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